Elara secured access to the Kaelen data center through meticulous planning and a little leveraged fear. Using an archived memo from the Records Bureau detailing a mandatory municipal security audit, she scheduled her visit during a low-staff night shift, minimizing direct supervision. She wore the plain gray clothing of her archivist persona, carrying only a specialized thermal regulation kit - a sophisticated container for Thorne's chip, disguised as a historical document scanner.
The Kaelen data infrastructure was buried deep beneath the manor, a humming, sterile vault of servers and fiber optics. The security guards on duty were bored, trusting the layers of biometric and digital protection more than their own vigilance.
"Veridia, Chief Archivist," Elara stated, presenting her fabricated credentials to the shift supervisor. "Mandatory quarterly physical asset audit. I only need access to the mainframe core to verify serial compliance."
The supervisor, intimidated by the sheer bureaucratic weight of the official document, waved her through. "Just don't touch anything, ma'am. That primary core routes everything, including Lord Cassian's trading."
"I understand. I am here to verify the paper trail, not interrupt the digital flow," Elara replied, her face a mask of professional boredom.
She entered the brightly lit core chamber. The primary processing hub - a sleek, black monolith humming with cold power - was the beating heart of Valen Kaelen's empire. All financial, communication, and security data flowed through it.
Elara moved quickly, isolating a small, dusty diagnostic port typically used only for maintenance reboots. She placed the thermal kit on the floor, opened its hidden compartment, and retrieved the micro-chip.
The deployment was a dance of absolute precision. Thorne's malware required a single, clean insertion - anything less than a five-second transfer window would trip the proprietary monitoring systems.
She inserted the chip. Time seemed to stretch. A small, silent light on the chip flickered once signaling the successful injection of the contagion into the core's routing software.
Four seconds.
She retrieved the chip, sealed the port, and packed away her tools. The entire operation took exactly forty-seven seconds. No alarms sounded, no lights flashed. The system had accepted the malware as an internal function, burying the pathogenic code deep within the data structure.
Elara felt the familiar surge of cold, focused satisfaction. It was clean. It was intellectual. It was the absolute antithesis of the brutal, messy execution she had witnessed as a child.
She walked out of the core chamber, nodded politely to the supervisor, and exited the data center.
As she stepped into the service corridor that led back toward the perimeter gate, she saw a familiar figure rounding the corner: Commander Joric Tahl.
He was in plain clothes, on his way back to his office after a late-night security assessment. He stopped, recognizing the precise, quiet woman from his earlier curiosity.
"Veridia," Joric greeted her, his voice low, his expression professionally neutral. "Late night for an Archivist. Did you find what you were looking for?"
Elara stopped, her heart rate spiking briefly - the only sign of the adrenaline coursing through her. She was a breath away from the man whose investigation would eventually expose her.
"Commander Tahl," she replied, meeting his gaze evenly. "Just verifying compliance. Everything is in order." She let her eyes linger on him for a calculated second, allowing him to register her detached competence, not her fear.
Joric merely nodded, his eyes noting the severe intelligence in her expression. "Good night, Archivist. I prefer things to be in order."
He watched her walk away - a precise, controlled figure dissolving into the shadows of the service hall. Joric dismissed her again as a peculiar but harmless bureaucrat, unable to know that the woman he found "unremarkable" had just planted the timed explosive that would shatter the House of Kaelen.